Post-Doctoral Award Holders (2008-2013)

Recent Post-Doctoral Fellows

Dr Anthony Ossa-Richardson holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Queen Mary, University of London, working on a project entitled 'The History of Ambiguity'. His first book The Devil's Tabernacle: The Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Thought, based on his doctoral research, will be out with Princeton University Press in May 2013. He is also contributing to the ongoing project to edit the works of Sir Thomas Browne, whose manuscript notebooks he transcribed and edited last year.

Dr Carrie Griffin holds an IRCHSS Government of Ireland CARA Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2010-13, which means that she works jointly between Queen Mary, University of London and University College Cork. Her current project, which will result in a monograph, is entitled ‘Learning and Information in the English Middle Ages and Early Modern Period: An Analysis of Textual Genres, Material Structures and Reorganisation’.

Dr Dmitri Iourinski has been funded by Leverhulme and AHRC as technical assistant on three projects June 2009-February 2013. He implemented Dissenting Academies Online and provides continuing support for both databases, Database and Encyclopedia and Virtual Library System, as well as for The Surman Index Online, and he is also creating new functionality for the project 'Private Books for Educational Use - the Formation of the Northern Congregational College Library'.

Dr Benjamin Bankhurst and Dr Rachel Eckersley funded by AHRC February 2012-February 2013 for the project 'Private Books for Educational Use - the Formation of the Northern Congregational College Library' (which follows on from 'Dissenting Academy Libraries and their Readers, 1720-1860'). This project extends the Virtual Library System by adding the catalogue of the Lancashire Independent College to the catalogues of Baptist, Congregational, and Presbyterian colleges already entered, and in particular it will include provenance details with appropriate images of the surviving books from the Northern Congregational College Library.

Dr Simon Dixon, funded by Leverhulme June 2008-May 2011 for the project 'A History of the Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660-1860'. With Dr Inga Jones (Sussex) and with the technical assistance of Dr Dmitri Iourinski he created Dissenting Academies Online: Database and Encyclopedia, a major digital resource for the study of the dissenting academies in the British Isles from 1660 to 1860. Simon had primary responsibility for all archive entries, as well as jointly entering data on academies, tutors, and students--currently over 220 academies, 750 tutors, 4000 archives, and 9,000 students are entered. He contributed 35 encyclopedia articles on tutors and academies. In 2011-12 he was Research Assistant at the University of Oxford working on 'The Professions in Nineteenth-Century Britain'. Since September 2012 he has been Digital Humanities and Special Collections Manager at the David Wilson Library, University of Leicester (a permanent post).

Dr Rosemary Dixon and Dr Kyle Roberts, funded by the AHRC Religion and Society Programme June 2009-May 2011 for the project 'Dissenting Academy Libraries and their Readers, 1720-1860'. They created with the technical assistance of Dr Dmitri Iourinski Dissenting Academies Online: Virtual Library System, a union catalogue which uses the functionality of twenty-first-century library software to recreate the holdings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century academy libraries and represent their loans. They located historic catalogues, shelf lists, and loan registers in archives, photographed them, arranged for their keying in, and entered details of books and borrowers: over 12,000 academy library books and 30,000 library loans made to over 600 borrowers. They have both contributed sections of the chapter on 'Libraries' to the forthcoming book, A History of the Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660-1860. Rose was temporary Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at King's College London, 2011-12; since 2011 Kyle has been Assistant Professor of Public History and New Media in the History Department at Loyola University, Chicago (a permanent post).

Dr Matthew Taunton held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the English Department at Queen Mary between 2010 and 2012 on the cultural effects of the Russian Revolution in Britain. His first book, based on his doctoral research, was Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris, published by Palgrave in 2009. He is an associate editor of Critical Quarterly, a journal of literary criticism, film, cultural studies and creative writing established in 1958 and published by Blackwell-Wiley. In September 2012 he took up a post as a lecturer at UEA.

Dr Rachel Hewitt completed her PhD at Queen Mary, and held a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship between 2009 and 2011 on Enlightenment and Romantic biography. During the fellowship she completed and published her first book, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (Granta 2010) which charted the early life of Britain's national mapping agency. She left to take up the Weinrebe Fellowship in Life-Writing at Wolfson College Oxford, where she is a member of the English faculty.

Dr Thomas Karshan held a Leverhulme Early Career Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Queen Mary, University of London between 2009 and 2011, following a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ Church, Oxford. He is the author of Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (Oxford University Press, 2011), the editor of Nabokov’s Selected Poems (Penguin UK and Knopf USA, 2012), and the co-translator (with Anastasia Tolstoy) of Nabokov’s Shakespearean verse-play, The Tragedy of Mister Morn (Penguin 2012; Knopf 2013). After the fellowship at QMUL he joined UEA as a lecturer in 2011.

Dr Stephanie Downes held a British Academy Postdoctoral Visiting Scholarship at Queen Mary, University of London in 2010-11, where she continued her research on the reception of writing by Christine de Pizan in England, from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. In 2012 she was appointed a postdoctoral research fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Dr Ann Matchette, a research fellow at the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, Queen Mary, hed a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2007-2009) on the subject The inequality of things: value in Italy 1400-1650.

Dr Santanu Das held a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at Queen Mary from April 2005 to April 2008, after which he took up a lectureship in the Department of English (ended 2011). His book Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature was published in 2006 by Cambridge University Press.